Friday, January 27, 2012

I have been diagnosed with leukemia, and both the disease
and the treatment have left me too exhausted to prepare my Windows as frequently as
I have in the past. I will continue to issue them as possible, but I fear there
will be gaps especially as the treatment proceeds.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Staunton,
January 25 – “It is too early to celebrate” President Dmitry Medvedev’s
proposal, under pressure from Russian society, to restore gubernatorial
elections because he will soon be out of office and because the arrangements he
and Vladimir Putin have made mean “the first” such votes would take place “only
in 2016,” according to the URA.ru news agency.

According
to the agency, which often breaks stories before Moscow outlets, officials in
the Urals region have received “explanations from the Presidential
Administration” that suggest no direct gubernatorial votes will begin before
2013 and that many may be appointed long after that (www.ura.ru/content/svrd/24-01-2012/articles/1036257519.html).

Last
week, Medvedev made his much-ballyhooed proposal to restore gubernatorial
elections, albeit with a number of qualifications including in most cases consultations
with the president. Then on Monday, Prime Minister and president-presumptive
Vladimir Putin said that there should be a “public” discussion about whether to
have such votes.

“But the
entire dispute,” URA.ru continues, “is to put it mildly premature,” given that
the staff of several regional heads in the Urals have told the agency that “their
leaders are calm and not even preparing for direct elections,” given the focus
on the presidential campaign and on Putin’s earlier elimination of votes on
these positions.

Aleksandr
Burkov, first deputy chairman of the Duma’s federal affairs and local
administration, confirmed the news agency’s conclusions, pointing out that any
new electoral law would certainly be reviewed by the incoming president and
incoming government before going into force.

That
will be made all the easier by the public discussion Putin has proposed and by
the plans of many governors to ask for a new expression of trust after the
March 4 elections, as “Kommersant” reported, requests that would likely keep
them in office until 2016, when the current term of the Duma expires.

Moreover,
Burkov told URA.ru, “in key regions, governors will be appointed.” Among those
would be the heads of “all the subjects of the Russian Federation included in the
Urals Federal District, except for that of Kurgan oblast” as well as likely in
many other parts of the country.

The Just
Russia deputy added that Medvedev’s draft in any case will have to be modified.
And the news agency stressed that those who think the election of governors is
a done deal may be disappointed, thereby suggesting that this concession to
public opinion may be little more than an electoral ploy rather than a move to
return to genuine federalism.

Staunton,
January 25 – Residents of Russia’s two capitals like ethnic Russians,
Belarusians, and Ukrainians but do not care for people from Central Asia and
the Caucasus, according to a new poll, findings that help explain why some of
the latter appear to have declared themselves to be Russians in the 2010
census.

The
All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) queries 1200
Muscovites and Petersburgers about their attitudes toward various
ethno-national groups. Both liked ethnic Russians most, 44 and 52 percent
respectively, then Belarusians, 17 and 14 percent, and then Ukrainians, 15 and
11 (www.neva24.ru/a/2012/01/24/zhiteli_stolic_nenavidjat_k/).

The
residents of the capitals disliked people from the Caucasus most of all, 31
percent in Moscow and 28 percent in St. Petersburg, and Tajiks, 23 and 24
percent.Muscovites disliked Azerbaijanis next (17 percent) and
then Uzbeks (13 percent); Petersburgers in contrast said they disliked Uzbeks
(18 percent) and then Azerbaijanis (11 percent).

Chechens were the fifth most disliked group in both
capitals, 12 percent in Moscow and 8 percent in St. Petersburg. Muscovites then
named Georgians (9 percent), Armenians (6 percent), Daghestanis (5 percent),
and “Asians in general” and Kyrgyz (4 percent each). Petersburgers said they
didn’t like Asians, Georgians and Daghestanis, 7 percent, 6 percent and 5
percent.

Sergey Markov, director of the Moscow Institute of
Political Research, said that residents of the capitals had a positive attitude
toward Belarusians and Ukrainians “because they in practice are not
distinguished from other Russians.Caucasians and Central Asians, on the other hand, stand out by behavior
many Russians see as alien.

As a result, parts of these communities, he continued,
are organized “into criminal groups and often it is difficult to distinguish
between criminal communities and diasporas.” That is especially true in the
case of the North Caucasians because they have “the rights of Russian
citizens.” Central Asians are disliked because of their numbers and the view
that they take jobs away from Russians.

Given these attitudes and given the current political
season, it is no surprise that the Russian State Statistics Committee (Rosstat)
says that the 2010 census shows that 91.6 percent of the residents of Moscow
are in fact ethnic Russians, a claim that has led some to ask “whom are you
going to believe – statistics or your own eyes?” (www.aif.ru/society/article/48961).

In the
current issue of “Argumenty i fakty,” journalist Galina Sheykina explores the
reasons that may be behind official claims. First, she provides what the 2002
and 2010 censuses show.In 2010, the
census found 11.5 million residents in Moscow. Some 668,000 did not give their
nationality, many more than the 417,000 who had done so in 2002.

“On the
other hand,” Sheikhina continues, “the overwhelmingly number of the rest
surveyed, namely 9.9 million, confidently declared that they are [ethnic]
Russians,” a figure 1.2 million more than the 2002 census enumerated there.
Moreover, the 2010 census found that the numbers of “practically all”
nationalities, including Ukrainians, Jews, Tajiks and Azerbaijanis had
declined.”

Natalya
Zubarevich, the director of the regional program of the Independent Institute
of Social Policy, said that there are great doubts about these official
statistics. First of all, she noted, “it was difficult for census takers to
work” because of “the high level of distrust of Muscovites to any surveys and
visits by those they don’t know.”

Second,
the social scientist continued, “a definite share” of citizens were “counted
twice” because “hundreds of thousands of people live at a different place than
where they are registered.And third,
the actual share of the total population surveyed was closer to 70 percent than
to the 90 percent officials claimed, with the percentage lower for non-Russian
groups.

But there
is another factor at work, she suggested, one which may help to boost the
claimed share of ethnic Russians in the population relative to other
groups.“Part of the population calls
itself [ethnic] Russians ‘in any case,’ fearing xenophobia in one or another of
its manifestations.”

Olga
Antonova, head of Rosstat’s administration for statistics on population and
health, provided yet another reason why claims about the ethnic Russian population
in Moscow are highly exaggerated. She told “Argumenty i fakty” that census
takers did not even ask the nationality of those who were “temporarily” in the city.

Gavkhar Dzhurayaev,
the head of the Migration and Law Information-Legal Center in Moscow, offered
another perspective:“Even if census
takers had queried all migrants,” they wouldn’t have gotten much information
because the gastarbeiters are generally afraid to tell anyone anything. Thus
most are quite prepared to say “I am a Russian” to end the conversation.

There
are “a few more than 200,000 legal migrants” in the Russian capital and many
more “illegal” ones. Thus, talk about a reduction in their numbers “does not
correspond to reality.” Officials and society need real numbers if they are to
address real problems as opposed to living in a situation where “no statistics
are equal to no problem.”

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Staunton,
January 24 – A major problem in both the USSR and the Russian Federation has
been the shortage of cash, the result of government policies which keep the
monetarization of the economy “five to ten times less than in developed
economies,” a situation that reached its apogee in the years immediately after
the collapse of the Soviet Union.

One
consequence of that decline in the 1990s when the rate of monetarization of the
economy fell to 15 percent, the Tolkovatel blog points out today was the
appearance of self-minted currency in 750 republics and cities of the Russian
Federation as well as at about 25,000 enterprises (ttolk.ru/?p=9273).

In a
detailed post richly illustrated with pictures of some of these notes and coins, the blog
explains that the appearance of such currencies, which took the place of the
lack of state-sanctioned cash, had its roots in Soviet times and was
exacerbated by the specific conditions of Boris Yeltsin’s rule.

After
the 1917 revolution, many regions and enterprises issued “surrogate banknotes”
until these were forbidden by 1935 in the RSFSR and in some Central Asian
republics in 1941, the blog portal reports. But after that time, Soviet leaders
wanted to keep the monetarization of the economy low “because there was not a
sufficient level of consumer goods and services.”

Indeed,
Tolkovatel points out, “whenever the quantity of money in the economy exceeded
a certain level, it was necessary to extract it from the population” by means
of “monetary reforms” like those which took place in 1947 and 1991,
confiscations which made Soviet citizens suspicious of their own state
currency.

But even
in Soviet times, “this rule had an exception: special currencies were printed
for special people,” prisoners at the bottom and the party-economic elite at
the other.Except for Weimar Germany in
the 1920s, there are virtually no examples of a developed country “which had
the parallel circulation at one and the same time of several types of legal
money.”

During perestroika,
“the highest monetarization of the economy” in the history of the country occurred,
the blog says.By 1991, monetarization
had reached “73 percent of GDP, one of the highest measures in the world for
that time and even greater than was the case then in the United States.”

This Gorbachev experiment was a failure, the blog
suggests, because of the absence of consumer goods and stock markets meant that
population had nowhere to spend its cash, and as a result, “the economy and
after it the USSR were destroyed.” Consequently, the Russian government carried
out the older policy of keeping the population poor “for the sake of security.”

While the system was in crisis, at the time of “the peak
of monetarization,” the first special currencies appearedBut in this case, the primary cause was not
economics but “the separatism of the regions and also the attemps of
enterprises in the general deficit to create their own small internal market ‘for
their own.’”

But the number of such currencies rose dramatically after
Prime Minister Yegor Gaydar in early 1992 signed a special circular officially
authorizing such currencies.Immediately, there appeared the currencies of Tatarstan, Nizhny Novgorod
oblast, Khakasia, the Urals Republic and “hundreds of cities and districts,”
ultimately involving 750 territories and 25,000 firms.

And that trend was exacerbated by the precipitous decline
of the monetarization of the Russian economy from 70 percent in 1990 to between
9.8 and 17 percent of GDP between 1992 and 1997. Barter filled some of this
gap, but surrogate currencies played an important role as well, especially to
pay workers or to make political points, to avoid paying taxes, and to serve,
along with foreign currency holdings, as a hedge against rumored monetary
reforms.

Tatarstan’s currency which first appeared in 1990 is
perhaps the best known, Tolkovatel suggests, but there were some equally
intriguing efforts. Kaliningrad Governor Leonid Gorbenko launched the “Kaliningrad
mark,” and Volgograd, which had ordered its currency printed in Italy,
circulated what became known as “liras” because the firm had printed the bills
in Italian.

There were also special currencies for refugees from
Chechnya, the blog continues They were printed by the Committee to Assist Those
Suffering from Armed Conflicts in the North Caucasus and were supposed to
circulate “’only on the territory of resettlement points and temporary camps.’”

Such currencies began to disappear under Yevgeny Primakov’s
premiership, but some, including that of Tatarstan, lasted until 2008. Under
Vladimir Putin, the monetarization of the country rose to 40 percent before the
economic crisis, a figure comparable with many African countries, Tolkovatel
says, but far less than during perestroika.

The blog concludes that no one should think that the era
of such currencies in the Russian Federation is now over forever.If the price of oil should fall to 50-60 US
dollars a barrel, such “surrogate” currencies would likely reappear, Tolkovatel
says, providing employment for “several thousand designers and contemporary
artists of the so-called ‘creative class.’”

Staunton,
January 24 – Daghestan should not be part of the North Caucasus Federal
District, a structure which “by its nature has not and cannot resolve the
problems of the regions” but rather become part of a new federal district which
would also include adjoining Russian regions on the northern shores of the
Caspian, according to a Makhachkala scholar.

Abdul-Nasir
Dibirov, the rector of the Daghestan Institute of Economics and Politics, told
the Regnum news agency that the North Caucasus Federal District “was created
not so much as an organic part of the power vertical but as a kind of buffer in
advance of in advance of the 2014 Olympic Games” (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1491219.html).

Specifically, Dibirov added, that district represented
an attempt “to isolate the problematic North Caucasus republics from Krasnodar
kray. But Moscow made a mistake by including Daghestan within the districts
borders because that republic “is not only a North Caucasus region but above
all a Caspian littoral one.”

Indeed,
“Daghestan’s future to an ever greater degree was connected not with the North
Caucasus but with the Caspian,” all the more so, Dibirov said, because “with
the conversion of the Caspian into an international sea,” the republic’s “geopolitical
situation” and “economic possibilities” will be fundamentally changed.

According
to the Makhachkala analyst, “it would be more organic to establish not a North
Caucasus Federal District but a Caspian Federal District which would include
Daghestan, Kalmykia, Astrakhan oblast and Volgograd oblast,” an arrangement in
which “the industrial potential of the northern regions would be combined with
the agricultural potential of the south.”

In any
case, Daghestan must “break away” from the problems of the North Caucasus,
Dibirov insisted.

Asked by
Regnum whether Moscow’s ideas of creating a resort cluster in the North
Caucasus will “solve the systemic problems” of that reason, the Makhachkala
scholar said that “such a project “hardly will be realized in the conditions of
an undeclared civil war,” a place where counter-terrorist operations are
frequently declared.

Instead, Dibirov continued, “one must begin
with the development of what already exists.” Roads need to be constructed so
that private enterprise will develop rural areas and so that rural people will
be able to remain in their villages among people of their own ethnicity and
culture but travel to urban regions for employment.

Dibirov
said that in his opinion, “the elimination of federal districts is hardly
likely to occur.” Gubernatorial elections “will return,” he continued, “but not
because the powers have any particular love for democracy but rather as the
result of pressure from society.” Indeed, these elections will make Moscow even
more interested in preserving the federal districts.

What
everyone needs to understand about the North Caucasus, the Makhachkala scholar
argued, is that “in essence” it “has departed from the legal field of Russia.
Here laws operate only selectively and are viewed” by the population as simply
covers “for the corrupted powers that be” who are “closely connected with the
criminal world.”

The Russian state does not yet have a well-developed policy
for the North Caucasus, Dibirov said, adding that “the impression has been
created” that Moscow wants to use threats from there to justify its approach to
rule, all the more so if Russian leaders want to use nationalism as a source of
legitimacy.

“Today,” Dibirov argued, “we see a power which at one
stage attempted to eploid liberalism, at a second stage conservatism, and now
ever more is shifting to nationalism, attempting to ride Russian ethnic nationalism.
This is a very dangerous policy,” the Makhachkala scholar said, but that is how
things look from Daghestan.

He rejected the suggestion that Moscow had created the
North Caucasus Federal District not because of the Olympics but on the basis of
“historical experience,” Debirov says that the Soviet-era North Caucasus kray
with a capital in Pyatigorsk is generally considered a failure, a view he said
he shares.

Indeed, even in Soviet times, “the leadership of
Daghestan at all times struggled in order to excape from this kray and to
subordinate itself directly to Moscow.” Once again, that is taking place
because “the future of Daghestan is tied to the Caspian” more than to the
troubled republics of the North Caucasus.

While Dibirov is only one voice, his remarks are
important for at least three reasons: First, as he suggested, Moscow is more
likely to retain the federal districts if it gives way on the election of
governors. Second, his remarks are a reminder that the borders of these districts
are likely to be the subject of disputes between Moscow and individual federal
subjects.

And third, Dibirov’s comments underscore that the
policies of Vladimir Putin in the North Caucasus have succeeded only in
creating the simulacrum of control, one that may make for good propaganda but
does not solve the problems the region faces or makes it the stable backdrop
for the Sochi Olympics that Putin and his supporters argue will be the case.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Staunton,
January 23 – In a transparent attempt to win votes but one that may backfire
not only among non-Russians but also among many Russians opposed to his authoritarian
approach, Vladimir Putin has published the nationality plank of his
presidential campaign, one that restates and extends ideas he has presented in
the past.

As he
has often done, the Russian prime minister stresses that the ethnic situation
in his country is “in principle different” than it is in other countries, with
its “nationality and migration problems “directly connected with the destruction
of the USSR and in esstence historically greater Russia which was established in
its essentials already in the 18th century.”

“Having
declared sovereignty 20 years ago,” Putin continues, “the then-deputies of the
RSFSR” in their struggle with “the ‘union center’” put in motion “the process
of the construction of ‘national states,’ including even within the Russian
Federation itself,” a process that could lead to “collapse and separatism.”

“With
the disintegration of the country,” he says, “we turned out to be at the edge
and in certain well-know regions even beyond the edge of civil war.” But
fortunately, just as in the case of “the first Russian time of troubles” in the
seventeenth century, while the state was “critically weakened, Russia did not
disappear.”

The
ethnic Russian people and ethnic Russian culture which defines and maintains “the
fabric of this unique civilization,” Putin argues, held things together and
even now are preventing those who would “with their own hands destroy their own
motherland” by calling for “a mono-ethnic state,” “the shortest path … the
destruction of the Russian people and Russian statehood.”

Moreover,
those who today say that it is time to “stop feeding the Caucasus” will
eventually say that it is time to “stop feeding Siberia, the Far East, the
Urals, and the Moscow region,” Putin adds, repeating the kind of domino effect
that led to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

The
[ethnic] Russian people, Putin continues, “is a polyethnic civilization held
together by a Russian cultural nucleus.” As such, “the [non-ethnic] Russian experience
of state development is unique.We are a
multi-national society,” he says, “but we are a single people,” something that
must oppose any “germ” of narrow nationalism.

Again as
he has done in the past, Putin notes that “many citizens of the USSR when they
were abroad called themselves [ethnic] Russians” because “in our identity is a
different cultural code” than others have. “the [ethnic] Russian people is the
state-forming people as is shown by the fact of the existence of Russia. The
great mission of the [ethnic] Russians is to unify and support [this]
civilization.”

“Such a
civilizaitonal identity is based on the preservation of [ethnic] Russian cultural
dominants, the bears of which are not only ethnic Russians but all the bears of
this identity independently of nationality.This cultural code which ahs been subjected in recent times to serious
tests” has been preserved.

From
this perspective, Putin argues that the Russian Federation needs “a strategy of
nationality policy based on civic patriotism,” one in which “every individual
living in our country must not forget about his faith and ethnicity. But he
must above all be a citizen of Russia and proud of that.”

“No one
has the right to put national and religious differences higher than the laws of
the state,” Putin says, although he does allow that “the laws of the state must
consider national and religious differences.” To that end, he calls for a new
nationalities agency, even though he was the one who disbanded as unnecessary
the Russian ministry for nationality affairs.

The
presidential candidate adds that the rights of ethnic Russians must be constantly
protected from abuse lest some begin to talk about “the national oppression of [ethnic]s
Russian” and use that to promote disorder or even to allow some to talk about
the rise of “’[ethnic] Russian fascism.’”

Force
must be used to suppress violence but otherwise dialogue should be maintained,
Putin suggests. Only “one thing” is not permissible: There must be no chance “for
the creation of regional parties, including in the national republics” because that
step “is a direct path to separatism.”

In some
detail, he calls for a toughening of immigration policy and expanded efforts to
ensure that legal migrants “adapt” to the Russian cultural code, all popular
positions given the number of gastarbeiters in Russian cities.But he uses this proposal to talk about
something else, which potentially has far reaching consequences.

Putin
suggests that to address the migration issue there needs to be “Eurasian
integration” across the former Soviet space, a process that will “strengthen
our ‘historic state,’ left to us from our ancestors. A state-civilization which
is capable of organically resolving the task of the integration of various
ethnoses and confessions.”

“For
centuries,” Putin concludes, “we have lived together. Together we won in the
most terrible war. And we will lvie together in the future.To those wo want or try to divide us, I will
say only one thing – don’t expect to succeed,” language that probably will
generate a different reaction in the other post-Soviet states than among his
supporters.

But one
comment today from a Kazan Tatar suggests how many of the Russian Federation’s
increasingly numerous non-ethnic Russians are likely to react to Putin’s
approach.In a commentary on ETatar,
Robert Bolgarsky politely but firmly disagrees with the Russian politician’s
approach (etatar.ru/top/42022).

Bolgarsky
begins by observing that Putin’s “long-awaited article” failed to provide
answers which “it would have been interesting” to find the answers to, among
which are Putin’s attitudes toward instruction in non-Russian languages in the
republics of the Russian Federation and to the state of native languages in
general.

Instead,
the Tatar commentator said, Putin used terms that raise more questions and will
lead almost any non-Russian to draw some very negative conclusions about what
the Russian prime minister and president presumptive believes and where he
wants to take the country in the future.

As
Bolgarsky notes, Putin talks about “[ethnic] Russian Armenians, [ethnic]
Russian Azerbaijanis, [ethnic] Russian Germans, [and ethnic] Russian Tatars.”Just who are “[ethnic] Russian] Tatars,” the
commentator asks, suggesting that Putin for some reason or other has confused
the terms “Rossiyanin” or non-ethnic Russian with “Russkiye” or ethnic Russian.

“Ask any
Tatar who speaks even the slightest amoung of his native language,” Bolgarsky
continues, Having heard the term ‘[ethnic]
Russian Tatar,’ he as a minimum will begin to think about what that means because
from birth he has not heard such a definition of his nationality.”

“Is this
a Tatar who has converted to Orthodoxy? Or is it a Tatar who has forgotten his
native language? Or is it a Russified Tatar? There are perhaps a great many
possibilities, but they all mean the loss of national identity, of the Tatar
cultural code, if you like, and thus the term ‘[ethnic] Russian Tatar’ is
viewed by Tatars themselves in an extremely negative way.”

Putin
should know, the Tatar commentator says, that there are more than 100 language
and ethnic groups who are “indigenous peoples of the federation. These are not
just Russian lands, they are Tatar, Bashkir, Koryak, Yakut and other lands. But
for some reason, Putin gives to the Russians ‘the great mission to unite.’”

Bolgarsky
then says “Permit me not to agree with you, Vladimir Vladimirovich! I am first
of all a Tatar and Muslim who considers Russia as his motherland. I am in no
way an ‘[ethnic] Russian Tatar’! I am a [non-ethnic] Russian Tatar,” despite
the fact that the laws of the Russian state don’t allow him or others to learn
their native languages to perfection.

But
Bolgarsky concludes that there is one point with which he has to agree with
Putin and that is when the prime minister says that anyone “who comes into
regions with other cultures and historical traditions must relate to local
customs with respect. To the customs of [ethnic] Russians and all other peoples
of Russia.”

So
anyone, including Russian presidential candidates who come to Tatarstan and the
Middle Volga should be good enough to “learn at least 100 words of Tatar” in
order to behave respectfully to the Tatar population.Vladimir Putin, Bolgarsky concludes, has been
good enough to do at least that.

Staunton,
January 23 – Komi-Permyak activists are using the Internet to highlight the
worsening situation in their region since it became the first small non-Russian
federation subject to be combined with a larger and predominantly ethnic
Russian one and to demand that Moscow restore their former status or allow them
to become part of the ethnically-related Komi Republic.

A group
of Komi-Permyaks, who feel that they were mistled or even betrayed when
Vladimir Putin orchestrated a referendum approving the elimination of their
autonomy and status as a federal subject and inclusion in Perm kray in 2005, have
launched a “Return Our Autonomy” page on Russia’s V kontakte” network (vkontakte.ru/topic-33845494_25626832)

Those
posting on this page say that their people have experienced a significant “deterioration
in the standard of living” since they were “swallowed by Perm kray and argue
that the only way forward for their Finno-Ugric nation is to leave that
formation and either be restored as a separate federal subject of become part
of the Komi Republic.

The
Soviet government formed the Komi-Permyak autonomous district in 1925, and
after the USSR disintegrated, it became one of the federation subjects
enumerated in the Russian Constitution. But in the name of administrative simplification,
then President Vladimir Putin pushed through its amalgamation with Perm on
December 1, 2005.

The
Komi-Permyaks and activists in several other Finno-Ugric nations in the Middle
Volga have complained since that time that the assistance they were promised
and the benefits they were told would flow from amalgamation have not happened
and that the Komi-Permyaks are worse off than before.

But this
is the first time that local activists have formed what could be described as a
nascent movement to reverse the amalgamation, and it comes as things appear to
be heating up among the population of the Finno-Ugric and ethnic Russian
subjects in this part of the Russian Federation.

Last
week, Aleksandr Kalashniko, the head of the FSB administration in the Komi
Republic, told the local paper, “Krasnoye znamya” that the most important task
his officers now have is “blocking extremism and its most serious form,
terrorism” among both Finno-Ugric and Russian populations (www.gumilev-center.ru/?p=9058).

In
addition to nationalists groups, Kalashnikov complained about the work of Golos
and Memorial, two human rights groups that he said were “directed from abroad,
often financed by foreign non-governmental foundations, and directed at the
transformation of the political system in Russia,” including by the disruption
of the upcoming presidential elections.

Staunton,
January 24 – The leaders of the post-Soviet state and in particular those who
have successfully constructed “administered democracies” no longer fear “orange”
revolutions, but they are being pushed toward “reforms” of one kind or another
by the economic crisis and the demonstrations that have already taken place across
the Russian Federation.

In today’s
“Novyye izvestiya,” Konstantin Nikolayev, Olga Gorbacheva and Elena Antonova
argue that recent weeks, “the former USSR has become an arena of unexpected political
developments … [as] one after another leader … begins to talk about reforms”
that would change “the entire political landscape in these states.”

Moreover,
the “Novyye izvestiya” writers continue, this outbreak of “reformist
initiatives in the near abroad looks particularly surprising if one takes into
consideration that it is occurring at the time of the real triumph of ‘administered
democracies’ over ‘the orange threat’” that earlier brought change to Georgia,
Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Mikhail
Khazin,the president of the Neokon Consulting Company, provides an explanation,
the journalists say. He suggests that the economic crisis presents “a far more
threatening challenge” to such leaders than any “hypothetical ‘orange’ threat’”
to existing arrangements.

“If an
individual lives in a situation in which his material well-being constantly
grows, he will not particularly reflect about who is leading the country. But
when incomes fall and the question arises as to whose incomes must be reduced,
then people immediately become interested in just how legitimate the authorities
are.”

The
December protests in Moscow and other Russian cities sent a message not only
because of what participants in them were saying but even more because those
taking part were very different than “the ‘orange’ meetings of the times of the
revolutions of 2003-2005” and because they came together spontaneously.

Belarusian
leader AlyaksandrLukashenka in a recent
speech drew a specific link between these protests and his suggestion – “for
the first time during his administration,” the journalists point out – of the
need for “political modernization,” whose nature perhaps not surprisingly, he
has not yet been willing to specify.

Lukashenka’s
opponents including Anatoly Lebedko of the United Civic Party and Aleksandr
Milinkevich of the For Freedom Movement thus remain skeptical, with the former
saying that Lukashenka is taking his cue from Moscow but perhaps and the latter
suggesting this may all be nothing more than “a playing at democratization.”

However that may be, the three journalists
write, the upcoming elections in Belarus may provide an opening: Lukashenka
might permit representation from the opposition to make himself and his regime
appear more legitimate not only among his own hard-pressed population but also
among European governments.

Kazakhstan
provides another example, the “Novyye izvestiya” writers say. Indeed, it was
the leader in this regard with President Nursultan Nazarbayev calling of
changes at least in part because of the protests in Zhanaozen, demosntrators
which resembled those in Moscow in one key particular: in both, the protesters
were largely drawn from the angry middle class.

But the most intriguing examples of these “winds
of change” may be in Turkmenistan and Moldova. In the former, for the first
time, several candidates will take part in the presidential election. And in the
latter, precisely because the economic crisis calls for unpopular measures, politicians
are talking about direct election of the country’s president.

How things may develop remains uncertain, the
journalists suggest, and they offer as a concluding remark the observation of
Mensk political scientist Vsevolod Shimov that any serious reforms will require
public consultations. If that doesn’t happen, than “the probability is great”
that things will go wrong, with negative consequences for all.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Staunton,
January 19 – In addition to the presidential election, Russians in numerous
cities including six regional capitals on March 4 will select mayors and city
council members, a process that has attracted much less attention but one that
represents both “yet another difficult test” for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia
and an opportunity for the political opposition.

The
journalist makes her point by surveying some of the key votes.In Omsk, for example, deputies of the city
council decided to hold elections to that body simultaneously with those for
the Russian presidency, something the acting mayor, Tatyana Vizhevitova has
strongly objected to, apparently because it gives other parties “a chance to
take power” locally.

At least
six other cities who have kept the direct election of mayors are likely to have
new chiefs, Savina says.“No surprises”
are expected in Astrakhan where United Russia has done well, but in Yaroslavl,
there may be a turnover given recent shifts. Moreover, it is clear that United
Russia mayors who do poorly “simply cannot continue to work.”

Indeed,
Rostislav Turovsky, head of the regional research department of the Moscow
Center of Political Technologies, told the “Novyye izvestiya” writer that this
wasn’t something that the individuals directly involved in were going to get to
decide but rather was the result of “a directive from the center.”

One
communist deputy in the Yaroslav oblast duma said that combining the elections
meant that participation would be higher – voters often don’t turn out for
local races iin Russia as is true elsewhere – and “the situation will therefore
be more objective than if the voting was carried out separately,” as at least
some in United Russia had wanted.

In some
places, Savina writes, there won’t be much of a struggle, but in others,
including Pskov, Kirov, Nalchik, Ufa, and Gorno-Altaysk, the competition among
candidates may be intense. Some United Russia candidates in these places will
benefit from stressing their attachment to Vladimir Putin rather than United
Russia, but others will suffer from either link.

If
candidates do try to distance themselves from United Russia, such a tactic “will
not convince everyone.” As several experts say, many voters who know is linked
with what party however much and perhaps even especially if candidates try to
hide their affiliation or conduct “an underground” campaign.

Valery
Khomyakov, a political scientist, told “Novyye izvestiya” that the efforts of some United Russia candidates
to hide their membership “yet again confirms that the December voting in Moscow
were falsified and that the rating of United Russia’ in [Moscow] was hardly the
46 percent that was announced.” Instead, it is “significantly lower.”

Savina
concludes her article with the observation that “now, the opposition has the
chance to get involved in lower-level politics,” now that a link “with United
Russia or with the powers that be as such, especially in Moscow,” is no longer
something that will help them. Rather the reverse.

And she quotes Khomyakov as
saying that “if the opposition tries to take power at the municipal level …
this could be a very good base for the further development of pressure,
including on the federal authorities.”

Staunton,
January 19 – In the face of a rising percentage of Muslims in the Russian armed
forces and of calls for a special handbook for them to be prepared by Muslim
leaders, a professor at the Russian military academy must ensure that the
training of soldiers will “be based only on a scientific worldview,” rather
than a religiously-inspired one.

Given “growing
inter-ethnic tensions” connected with the recent demonstrators, Sergey
Ivaneyev, who teaches at the All-Forces Academy of the Russian armed services,
says in “Voenno-Promyslenny kuriyer,”, “the link between religious and ethnic
self-identification” is intensifying throughout Russian society (vpk-news.ru/articles/8548).

While
much of this and especially the opposition between “the Slavic Russian
population and Muslims” is both “artificial and provocative,” he continues, no
one should ignore this problem or fail to work to prevent its growth,
especially in key institutions like the Russian armed forces.

“All of
us must recognize, Ivaneyev writes, “that in Russia, mass religiosity of
citizens is a potential source of conflict since each religious system as a
result of antagonist social conditions has by its nature a negative and at
times openly hostile attitude toward other religions.”

Such
relations, he continues, can take on “hypertrophic forms” and affect entire
communities, something that is “especially evident when leaders of a negative
direction” use the presence of their co-religionists or co-ethnics in military
units of various sizes to promote their own interests or to defend their groups
against commanders and others

Indeed, such
“inter-ethnic conflicts can acquire particularly sharp and fanatic forms” and
lead to calls for “a religious war” and for “the complete destruction of its
opponent and of members of all other faiths.” And that danger, Ivaneyev
continues, is visible in calls for the production of “a special handbook for
Muslim draftees” that some muftis want to prepare.

Seven years ago, the Russian
military, working with Sheikh Ravil Gaynutdin, prepared a 102-page booklet
entitled “Methodological Recommendations to Infantry Officers on Work with
Muslim Soldiers.”But despite the
shortcomings of that pamphlet, Ivaneyev says, allowing Russian muftis to
prepare and disseminate a larger one could exacerbate the situation.

Even the 2005 publication suffered because
it was written “not on the basis of scientific religious studies but from the
position of a contemporary ‘ideological’ theology and objectively was directed
at the strengthening of the position of Islam in society and in the Armed
Forces of the Russian Federation and also at the defense of this religion” from
analysis and criticism.

Any new work, prepared not by
scholars but by Muslim religious leaders, he says, would be even more
provocative, for as the Carnegie Moscow Center scholar A.V. Malashenko has put
it, “we observe a lack of correspondence between the Islamic and Russian civil
vectors of identity.”

Russia’s force structures, the
military scholar says, “have dealt well with the tasks of destroying and
neutralizing the expansion of Islamism.” But there is a shortcoming in their
work more generally: “we do not always know about those social-worldview
sources which feed contemporary forms of Islamic extremism, fundamentalism and
terrorism.”

And that means there is a real risk
that the spread of the Islamic faith, especially if it takes place on its own
terms, could lead to “anti-social activity” and forms of “Muslim extremism,”
which starts with efforts to hold Islam “as the highest model of spiritual
culture which [supposedly] corresponds to the interests of the individual and
world society as a whole.”

A directive of the Procurator
General, Interior Ministry and FSB on December 16, 2008, Ivaneyev says,
specified that “extremism under the cover of Islam has spread into a number of
phenomena which are essentially influencing the criminogenic situation in
Russia” and that “90 percent” of those involved in terrorism “have direct ties
to Islamist organizations.”

Today, given “the clericalization of
the army and fleet,” he continues, “the underlying principles of the very
conception of the training of soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Russian
Federation are being violated,” and consequently, commanders must work to
promote “a scientific world view” and its related “moral norms.”

In this situation, “the importance
of the problem of forming the moral-legal consciousness of Russia’s Muslim
soldiers is growing in particular.”

Those who are to be “convinced
defenders” of Russia, he argues, “must be trained only from the position of a
secular worldview” and be ready to act “not according to religious motivations”
before God and eternity “but from the conviction of the need to fulfill his
civic obligations regardless of his personal religious convictions.”

Such an approach, Ivaneyev says, is
necessary “because Russian society is multi-national and poly-confessional.”
Allowing Muslim religious leaders to instruct Muslim soldiers on their own could
undermine these various goals, and consequently, the military must insist that
Muslim troops learn not from them but from “the study of the foundations of
scientific Islamic studies.”

Staunton,
January 19 – The leader of the Russians Foundation has written to Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin urging him to establish a special ministry for
demographic development to deal with the country’s demographic decline,
migration, and support for compatriots living outside of the Russian Federation.

The
Marker.ru news agency reported yesterday that Leonid Shershenev, in a letter
signed by other ethnic Russian leaders, told the premier that “only the
establishment of a new state organ will be able to solve the problems of
emigration and the continuing reduction in the size of the Russian population”
(marker.ru/news/512239).

In the
letter, Shershenev also said that in his opinion, there was no need to restore
the ministry for nationality affairs which simply “lobbied for the interests of the leaderships of
national minorities to the harm of the broad strata of the population” and
“never even once” discussed the demographic problems of the Russian nation.”

A Ministry for
Demographic Development, the foundation head continued, would be different. Its
departments would oversee the government’s “demographic policy” and would
develop a state “concept” to ensure not only a common approach of all agencies
but also progress in turning Russia’s demographic situation around

Shershenev is not the first to make this
argument, the news agency reported. Seven years ago, it said, “Igor
Beloborodov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Demographic Research, made
the same proposal, and recently, he even posted this idea on the prime
minister’s websiteAnd deputies from
Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party have advanced similar ideas

Beloborodov
told Marker.ru that Russia has “the largest indicator of population decline” of
any country in the world and complained that despite pledges by the country’s
leaders to do something about this, “there have not been any administrative
actions for the resolution of the problems.”

As a result, he
continued, the various agencies involved with population questions do so in an
uncoordinated fashion and only as a secondary issue to their primary
responsibilities.” As a result, one cannot speak of a genuine state policy in
this critical area, a situation that he said “should not be the case.”

“But
not all experts consider that the creation of a new state agency would solve
the problem of the reduction in the number of Russians,” the news agency says. Some think its creation would only “increase the number of bureaucrats,”
without having any impact on the underlying forces at work

Elena
Tyuryukanova, a scholar at the Moscow Institute of Social-Economic Problems of
Population, for example, opposes creating such a ministry. “In order to come up
with a conception of demographic development, it isn’t necessary to create a
ministry.” Indeed, Russia already has such a concept paper.” Setting up a new
ministry wouldn’t change anything.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Staunton,
January 18 – The Social Chamber yesterday held a discussion on “The Nationalist
Danger in Russia: The Results of 2011. Trends, Prospects, and Countermeasures,”
a session at which many views on that subject were aired and which has
attracted a great deal of attention in the Moscow media.

The main
presentation was made by Valery Engel, the deputy chairman of “World Without
Nazism, in which he outlined the findings and conclusions of Semyon Charny’s
report on “The Social Bases and manifestations of Nationalistic Attitudes in
the Russian Federation” in 2011 (worldwithoutnazism.wordpress.com/monitor/russia/2011-overview/).

According
to Engel, the number of extreme right-wing Russian nationalists itoday is some
20 to 24 thousand, but despite their numbers, they are now seeking to have an
impact on the country’s power structures and even penetrate them rather than
engage in easily suppressed violent action (www.sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/discussions/2012/01/d23436/).

He
concluded his pessimistic report by suggesting that “the growth of the aggressive
activity of nationalistic leaders in Russia is taking place on the background
of [and clearly because of] the weakness displayed by the liberal wing” of
Russian public opinion (oprf.ru/press/news/2012/newsitem/16412).

Another
participant, Nikolay Svanidze, the chairman of the Chamber’s Commission on
Interethnic Relations and Freedom, suggested that the radical right had already
been successful in penetrating the government and that Dmitry Rogozin, former
Russian ambassador to NATO, is an example of that threat.

He added, “Moskovskie novosti” reports today,
that “Russian society may be presented with a choice between Rogozin and
Aleksey Navalny who is inclined to use ‘the popular resource’ of nationalism,”
noting that the radicals view themselves as potential “brides” of whatever
group will offer them the most (mn.ru/society_ethnic/20120118/309942823.html).

Aleksandr
Verkhovsky, the director of the SOVA Center, said that his views in large
measure coincide with those of Engel. He said that the police have been able to
reduce thenumber of criminal actions by the extreme nationalists, prompting the
latter to turn to legal political action while maintaining “anti-system
rhetoric.”

He added
that “at present, Russia cannot completely exclude nationalism from the life of
society, but he argued that it is very important that political leaders ensure
that the Russian population understands just what a nation is. Dmitry Medvedev
and Vladimir Putin were taking steps in this direction a year ago but since
then have cut back on this “almost to nothing.”

Verkhovsky
was followed by Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the outspoken head of the
social-relations department of the Moscow Patriarchate.He argued that nationalists have the right to
speak out because “liberal democracy is not a universal recipe” for solving all
problems. Instead, he called for “uniting” Russians against “xenophobia and
separatism.”

The
Orthodox churchman added that “it is necessary to solve the problems that ‘patriotic
organizations’ are raising,” including the lack of definition of the status of
the ethnic Russian people and “the difficulty of its self-organization” as a
traditionally evolved ethno-social community (www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/1962293.html).

Vladiir
Zorin, a former Russian minister for nationality affairs, pointedly asked why
Engel and the others were not talking about migration patterns since “it is
evident,” he said, “that precisely the growth of migration pressure in the big
cities is also a cause of the growth of tension” in Russian society (mn.ru/society_ethnic/20120118/309942823.html).

Other
speakers provided additional perspectives. Aleksandr Sokolov, a member of the Social
Chamber, said that “in practice, all opposition forces in Russia are playing
the nationalist card” and that in the current presidential campaign, there is
likely to be “an outburst of nationalist rhetoric,” a development he called on
Vladimir Putin to condemn.

Georgy
Fedorov, the president of the Center of Social and Poltiical Research, noted
that it is extremely difficult to “separate out nationalists who are capable of
negotiation.”But he said liberals must
try, rather than as is often the case “toying” with nationalists as Boris
Akunin did recently in his conversation with Navalny.

And finally, political scientist
Mikhail Tulsky said it is also a mistake to brand everyone in the government or
out who can be accused of one or another form of xenophobia to be a member of
some kind of “party of nationalists.”Failure to distinguish between such people and the real radical right
overstates the power of the latter (mn.ru/politics/20120117/309942626.html).

Staunton,
January 18 – Sergey Belanovsky, research director of the Moscow Center of
Strategic Developments which predicted the mass demonstrations at the end of
2011, says that the next phase of Russia’s political crisis is likely to take
place in the provinces, with strikes and uprisings there attracting sympathy
and support from the urban middle class.

In an
interview posted on the “Russky zhurnal” portal yesterday, the sociologist says
that unlike many of his colleagues, he personally “did not expect such
activity” in Moscow, adding that those thinking about the future need to
remember that it is not the case that “all revolutions are made in capital cities”
(www.russ.ru/pole/Perspektivy-politicheskogo-krizisa).

While
many revolutions are in fact made there, Belanovsky continues, “there is
another type of revolution” which could be “purely conditionally called ‘the
peasant war,’ when on the territory of a large country uprisings break out
which then come together into a single movement” beyond the capacity of the
central authorities to cope.

China,
of course, has been a “classical” case of such revolutions throughout history,
he noted, adding that he considers that “it is completely probable that in
Russia all will go namely according to the scenario of a peasant war,” a
conclusion he reached on the basis of a number of focus group sessions in
central Russia outside of Moscow.

Participants
in these sessions routinely complain about governors who take care of their
capitals but do little or nothing for the rest of their regions or republics.
Such attitudes are likely to grow, Belanovsky says, leading to the outbreak of
strikes and protests about specific issues beyond the capacity of the regime to
deal with.

A major
reason why he expects that pattern of development and why unlike others he
believed that not everything “will begin in the capital,” the analyst
continues, is that Moscow has been “quiet for quite a long time.” The middle
class there has now woken up, but it is not alone: future events “will
intensify both in the capital and in the provinces.”

Asked
about his institute’s suggestion that following parliamentary elections there
would need to be a coalition government and a new prime minister, Belanovsky
says that such a figure must be “attractive and sufficiently independent … in
any case “not [incumbent President] Dmitry Medvedev.”

Unfortunately,
the analyst suggests, there are not a large number of such people around, but
the list might include Igor Sechin and Sergey Ivanov, who might be able to
overcome a situation which currently is defined by the “aging” of “brand Putin”
and the danger of a new period of stagnation.

According
to Belanovsky, there is “no chance” that “brand Putin” can be “rehabilitated.”
The only thing that could continue would be “a scenario of conservatism.” That
is at least possible because “the female electorate… categorically does not
want a revolution. Perhaps, it will be this segment [of the population] that
will allow the situation to be preserved.”

Putin
may somehow be able to maintain his “brand” even after the March elections, but
if he does so, the analyst argues, it will be possible to “make an analogy with
the Brezhnev brand,” although the situation today “is already not what it was
then.” At that time, the regime was able to maintain “the illusion” of control,
but it cannot do so now.

The power
structures of today and of Putin “in particular” may be able to change their
rhetoric but they “are not in a situation to seriously influence the situation
in the country,” he goes on to say. Putin’s practice of combining “threatening
rhetoric” with inaction” is “losing its effectiveness and the people are tired
of it.”

Putin
will certainly try to advance a new program much as Soviet leaders did at
meetings of the Communist Party, but people will only react negatively now just
as they reacted negatively 30-40 years ago – and for the same reason, they
won’t listen to the message, even if it is reasonable, because they have
already reached a judgment on the messenger.

Clearly,
Belanovsky concludes, the protest wave will proceed in a sine curve, with periods
of growth and periods of decline.In
response, as it has done already, the powers will make “concessions,” albeit
only “nominal ones.” But such concessions will “provoke and intensify the
pressure” against them.

In this
situation, the sociologist says, something will break out “somewhere in the
provinces.” Then, “in Moscow, protest groups will immediately assemble in
support of the regional protests” and send “volunteer emissaries.”The country will thus be united in this way
because after all “the Internet works.”

Staunton,
January 18 – Gadzhi Gadzimusayev, a Daghestani Muslim who has lived in Moscow
for 45 years,, has given 150 million rubles (5 million US dollars) to build a
Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow because he “wanted to leave something after
himself for the good of Muscovites.”

Gadzhimusayev
took this step, Archpriest Sergey Kiselev of the Trinity Church District in the
Russian capital told “Vechernyaya Moskva” on Monday , when no Orthodox
Christian appeared ready to do so.The
cornerstone of the new church was laid this week, and the brick church is
slated to open this summer (www.vmdaily.ru/showarticle.php?id=339312).

Anton
Elin, a journalist at that paper, asked Gadzhimusayev “why he had spent money
on an Orthodox church and not on a mosque.” He responded that although born in
Daghestan, he had lived “45 years in Moscow” and that he “wanted to leave after
himself something for the good” of the city and “a church is better than any
other monument because it will be eternal.”.

Gadzhimusayev
added that he had already contributed to the construction of two other churches
but that the latest one will be special: “the cupola will be covered with gold
and it will be build with red brick.” He said he was following the behavior of
the Prophet Muhammed who “protected the monastery of St. Catherine” and added
that in his view, “God is one.”

Archpriest
Sergey told the paper that the Orthodox Church had not in this case “seen any
[Orthodx] investors so far.” They exist, he suggested, “but there aren’t any o
fthem as it were.For our Orthodox
people, the Muslims are an example.” And he noted that a Muslim factory
director on the outskirts of Moscow had recently opened a chapel in the yard of
his firm.

While
neither Gadzhimusayev or Sergey mentioned it, there may be other reasons behind
the Daghestani’s investment. On the one hand, such actions almost certainly are
intended to overcome tensions between Russians and arrivals from Daghestan and
other parts of the North Caucasus.

And
on the other, the unwillingness of Moscow officials to allow the construction
of even a seventh mosque in a city which has more than two million people of
Muslim heritage may mean that anyone who wants to build a religious facility
has little choice but to contribute to the construction of a church, possibly
in the hopes that Muslims will be able to pray there as well.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Staunton,
January 17 – Only 30 percent of the heads of regions and republics in the
Russian Federation have a good chance to win re-election if Russian President
Dmitry Medvedev’s draft proposal to restore elections at that level of the
country’s political system is accepted by the Russian State Duma, according to
a Moscow expert.

But the
provisions of the final form of such legislation and the ways in which it might
be subverted by strong central executive power are already sparking discussions
in Moscow about whether Medvedev’s proposal constitutes a genuine return to
electoral democracy in the regions or whether it is a kind of window dressing
in advance of the March 4 presidential vote.

If the
heads of Russia’s federal subjects again are to be filled by popular vote,
Yevgeny Minchenko, the head of the International Institute of Political
Expertise, told the Novy region news agency yesterday, “one can expect a
serious rotation of the heads of regions” because only 30 of the incumbents
would likely win such votes (www.nr2.ru/moskow/367578.html).

The
others “have no chance” at all, he suggested. Among those with the least
chances of election are the heads of the republics of Adygeya,
Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Karelia, Komi, North
Osetia, tyva, Udmurtia, and Chuvashia, an indication of just how unpopular
their leaders are among the non-Russian nations of the country.

Other
leaders likely to fail in any bid for election would be the heads of the
Krasnodar, Transbaikal, Perm, Primorsky and Stavropol kray, and the head of
Khakassia, yet another indication that non-Russians within the Russian
Federation who make up sizeable percentages of the population of these subjects
are also ready to vote for change.

Among
regional heads with mid-range chances to win a popular vote, the Moscow
political expert said, are the heads of Bahkortostan, Buryatiya, Daghestan,
Ingushetia, Mari El, Yakutia, Kamchatka and Krasnoyarsk kray. And mong those
with “the greatest chance” are the governors of places like Voronezh, Kemerovo,
and Kaluga as well as Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov, Tatarstan President Rustam
Minikhanov and Mordovia head Nikolay Merkushkin.

Then,
Minchenko said, there are some special cases. Moscow’s currenthead has “not bad
chances” to be elected because “Moscow is so constructed that it is complicated
to restore competitive elections:” there are no “specifically Moscow media,”
and it is very difficult to conduct a “door to door” campaign since the numbers
of voters is so large.

But in
his comments to the news agency, Minchenko said his estimate may not matter
because the real issue is elsewhere: “Medvedev has come out with a proposal,
but [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin is silent,” raising the question of what is
really going on and whether gubernatorial elections will in fact return.

In an
article in today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” journalists Aleksey Gorbachev and
Ivan Rodin explore some of the details of Medvedev’s proposal, details that may
be changed in the course of parliamentary consideration or may be exploited in
ways that would reduce the significance of the restoration of such votes (www.ng.ru/politics/2012-01-17/1_gubernator.html).

According
to Medvedev’s draft, parties could nominate candidates but such candidates
would have to be confirmed in some way or other by the president, possibly a
face-saving measure for Putin who did away with gubernatorial voting or
possibly a way to vitiate popular sovereignty altogether. Candidates could also
win nomination by petition.

The
“Nezavisimaya” journalists say that sources in the Kremlin “assure that
consultations with the president will bear a purely voluntary character,” but
on the basis of their past experience, many Russians and indeed many Russian
parliamentarians may be deeply suspicious of such claims.

That is
all the more so because “before the mass protest actions,” President Medvedev
spoke about the return of gubernatorial elections “as an extremely distant
perspective,” and several years earlier,he said that “the return of the former
system of electing governments was not something [Russia] needed even a century
from now.”

Moreover,
in July 2011, Putin, the Moscow paper continues, “said that “there is ‘no
violation of the principles of democracy’” involved in the appointment rather
than election of governors. He added that elections only made the governors
corrupt because they allowed candidates to “manipulate public opinion” and engage
in corrupt practices.

Now, as
Aleksey Makarkin, the deputy general director of the Moscow Center of Political
Technologies, pointed out, “the situation in the country has changed;” and
Medvedev at least has changed his tune, although whether he, let alone Putin
who preceded and plans to succeed him have changed their past views remains to
be seen.

Makarkin
suggested that provisions calling for presidential approval of candidates were
frought with difficulties: “If the president will be a dominating figure, then
his disapproval of a candidate proposed by the parties might be viewed as an
informal veto, but an attempt to block a popular candidate would have a
negative impact on the president himself.”